I may not have went into enough detail first time through. The logic we were
using when we did the ASP,XML,XSL approach was to make certain accessibility
guidelines easier to accomplish. An example would be checkpoint 3.1, which
states that if an appropriate markup exists you should use it. Unfortunately
not all browsers support all the languages, so our logic was to use MathML,
for instance, in browsers that supported it and send a GIF (with appropriate
ALT text) of the equation if the browser did not. Another reason was that
some browsers choke on and render stylesheets or markup it doesn't know
horribly, so our logic was to send a different stylesheet/markup or none at
all depending on the browser. The end product being clean HTML without any
hacked areas used to keep a site cross-platform/cross-browser. We never
thought of using this method as a sole way of accessibility. Just because
someone has a recent browser doesn't mean they don't have JavaScript or
images turned off, so the other guidelines were always thought of when
designing (still functions without scripts, meaning holds without image,
etc.). I just thought this was a good way of meeting some of the guidelines
and keeping as clean presentation as possible.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org>
To: "Ryan Eby" <ebyryan@msu.edu>
Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: How to convince businesses to be accessible...
> One problem is that although I use lynx I actually prefer to get the
images
> included in the source - every so often I decide to look at one, which is
> very trivial.
>
> The basic difficulty is that what browser a user has is not a good guide
to
> what are the preferences and needs of the user - that needs to be answered
by
> hte users themselves. W3C is working on a system called CC/PP (that's
easier
> to remember than the real name) designed to allow this kind of information
to
> be sent by the browser to the server. And there are in fact a lot of
people
> using these kinds of approaches. The simplest version is to provide a link
to
> a text-only version of a page (This is helpful to some users but not by
> itself a solution), and there are many other methods used. The trick is to
> get the right information about the user and what they want, and that is
not
> easy.
>
> Cheers
>
> Charles McCN
>
> On Fri, 6 Oct 2000, Ryan Eby wrote:
>
> A friend of mine did this on his site with ASP (as a learning tool - his
> site is not commercial). He wrote all his content in XML pages and then
used
> a ASP page to check the HTTP header to find the browser version and then
> apply a different XSL stylesheet depending on the browser. It was then
sent
> off to the browser as HTML. If the browser was one that didn't support
> images than he used a stylesheet that left out the images and HTML that
> might have been a hindrance. It may seem like a lot of work but it
really
> wasn't. He only created the content once and about a half dozen
stylesheets.
> And the ASP code he wrote once and then copy and pasted it for the other
> pages changes the content variable to point to the proper file. It
worked
> quite well as far as I could see (on lynx, NS, and IE). I'd give you the
> link but he is running it locally on his machine now because of lack of
> extra funds for hosting). Are there any problems with this approach that
I
> am missing.
> _____________________________
> Ryan Eby